National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya will also serve as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a week of shake-ups in the Trump administration’s public health agencies.
Senior administration officials confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that Bhattacharya will helm the CDC and continue his role at the NIH until President Donald Trump appoints a permanent CDC director.
The switch comes after the former acting CDC director, former biotech investor Jim O’Neill, left the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly on Friday. O’Neill was previously both acting director and deputy to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Trump has had a series of CDC directors during his second term in office, having trouble keeping the position filled as the agency has come under intense scrutiny in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The president’s first nominee, former Republican congressman Dr. Dave Weldon, was unable to secure enough GOP support to be confirmed by the Senate due to his advocacy for vaccine policy changes in the early 2000s. The White House withdrew his nomination within hours of his confirmation hearing last year.
Trump then nominated Dr. Susan Monarez, who served as acting director while awaiting Weldon’s confirmation. Monarez was a longtime government research scientist viewed as largely out of step with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Monarez was terminated from her position at the CDC after having a falling-out with Kennedy in August, less than a month after she assumed the post. She later told the Senate in an oversight hearing that she was fired because she refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s requests to change the childhood vaccine schedule.
O’Neill assumed the post shortly after Monarez’s termination and had until mid-March to serve as acting director, under the statutory limit of 210 days.
During Trump’s first term in office, he appointed two CDC Directors: Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald from 2017 to 2018, and Dr. Robert Redfield for the remainder of Trump’s first term.
O’Neill’s departure from senior leadership at HHS came shortly after the department announced that Chris Klomp, director of Medicare, and several other lower-level appointees would be taking a more central role in advising Kennedy in the lead-up to the 2026 elections.
A White House official confirmed for the Washington Examiner that O’Neill will be nominated as the next head of the National Science Foundation, which funds grant research projects at universities and other institutions nationwide.
Bhattacharya and O’Neill “are eminently qualified for these positions, and the White House has confidence in them to deliver on the President’s agenda,” the White House official said.
Bhattacharya is relatively popular among conservatives and MAHA acolytes for his work criticizing mass lockdowns during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. He made a name for himself as one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which counseled governments to abandon restrictions and to direct resources toward elderly and vulnerable populations.
The leadership change-up at the CDC comes as trust in the public health agency has continued to decline, particularly because of the CDC’s recommendation to decrease the number of vaccines children receive from 17 to 11.
More than half of voters, 53%, including a quarter of Republicans, said in a recent poll that the move made them trust federal health agencies less, according to a poll last month from the health policy group KFF.
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In April 2025, three months into Kennedy’s term, 70% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans expressed at least a fair amount of confidence in the vaccine information delivered by the CDC.
As of January, only 55% of Democrats and 43% of Republicans said they were fairly confident in the CDC’s vaccine recommendations.
